Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
Tyranny of the majority
Context: The workshop is wrapping up. There are too many ideas on the wall, and a decision needs to be made, so dot voting is introduced. Everyone gets three dots and places them on their favourites. The tallied results are clear, and the facilitator announces the winners. Most people seem satisfied. A few do not. Their priorities were lost, their concerns were not addressed, and the vote moved on before the reasoning behind the minority view was ever really heard. They leave with a decision they had no real part in making. In meetings, the same pattern plays out through a show of hands, anonymous polls, or simply the loudest voices drowning out the quieter ones. It feels democratic. It is not.
OST explains: Dot voting and majority voting are representative democracy mechanisms, which really are DP1 in disguise. They produce a winner and, by definition, a loser, and the minority does not just lose the vote; they lose the ability to influence the outcome, making them unlikely to commit to implementing something they actively disagreed with. Fred Emery called the alternative rationalisation of conflict: instead of forcing a resolution through voting, the group stays with the disagreement long enough to understand it. The goal is not the most popular option, but the option nobody has a reasoned objection to. A higher bar that takes longer, but produces genuine shared ownership that majority voting never can. A decision reached that way does not need to be enforced; people carry it forward because they helped make it.
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #collaboration
